This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

It has been nearly three years since Japan's nuclear disaster. Just at the moment when ocean-bound pollution from Fukushima is reaching the Pacific coast of North America, with potential but unconfirmed impacts on fisheries and crops, the pro-nuclear lobby has mobilized in the United States. A new documentary is out, Pandora's Promise (2013), which extols the 'green' virtues of nuclear power. Anyone concerned about climate change, the film insists, should promote nuclear energy. Or, to put it another way, if you are anti-carbon, you have to be pro-nuclear. This campaign reveals the ugliness of political plays around the energy business, as it plays down any dangers from Fukushima's fallout.

Robert Stone, producer and director of film, measured energy safety in terms of "deaths
per terawatt," that is, how many people die per unit of energy produced. Within
the first minute of the film, one narrator instructs the audience that the political outlook
of the documentary is "liberal democrat." A liberal political
concern for the environment is aligned with the interests of the nuclear
industry. Whatever you do, the film enjoins, don't lose your head,
don't panic about Fukushima. The director's statement insists that if
you want to be a liberal, true and forward-thinking environmentalist,
then you must be pro-nuclear:

I’ve
considered myself a passionate environmentalist for about as long as I
can remember. My mother read me Silent Spring when I was nine and the
specter of a Cold War nuclear arms race was not an uncommon topic around
the dinner table in my family. So my anti-nuclear and environmental
roots run very deep. My first film was an anti-nuclear weapons
documentary, Radio Bikini, that premiered at Sundance in 1988 and went
on to receive an Oscar® nomination for Feature Documentary. My film
Earth Days, which was Closing Night Film at Sundance in 2009, chronicles
the rise of the environmental movement of my youth. In the course of
making Earth Days I began for the first time to see the deep pessimism
that has infused today’s environmental movement, and to recognize the
depth of its failure to address climate change. It was initially
through getting to know Stewart Brand that I was introduced to a new and
more optimistic view of our environmental challenges that was
pro-development and pro-technology. From there I began to seek out and
discover a small but growing cadre of people around the world who were
beginning to stand up and challenge what had become the rigid orthodoxy
of modern environmentalism.

It’s
no easy thing for me to have come to the conclusion that the rapid
deployment of nuclear power is now the greatest hope we have for saving
us from an environmental catastrophe. Yet this growing realization has
led me to question many of the founding tenets of traditional
environmentalism, from the belief that we can dramatically reduce our
energy demand through energy efficiency to the belief that solar and
wind power will one day power the planet. The almost theological
adherence to a set of unquestionable beliefs by most liberals and
environmentalists has likely contributed as much or more to prolonging
our addiction to fossil fuels as the equally appalling state of denial
among many conservatives when it comes to climate change. Both sides
are locked into rigid, self-righteous ideological positions with
potentially disastrous consequences for us all unless we begin to face
the facts.

For
the past three years I have devoted almost every waking moment to
taking these ideas and shaping them into a documentary about what is
perhaps the biggest and most unwieldy subjects imaginable: how do we
continue to power human civilization without destroying the
environmental conditions that has made modern civilization possible? I
knew from the beginning that this film would have to be firmly grounded
in personal narrative if it were to have any impact at all on a mass
audience. Early on I determined that the film would be framed around a
few key individuals who had undergone a dramatic intellectual
metamorphosis on the issue of nuclear power, as I, myself had done. The
evolution of their apostasy on this issue – their journey from being
staunchly anti-nuclear to passionately pro-nuclear -forms the central
dramatic arc of the film. My hope is to take the audience on a similar
journey of discovery through the process of watching the film.

PANDORA’S PROMISE
is without question the most personal and important film of my career.
I’ve learned that just about everything I thought I knew about energy
turned out to be wrong. And most of what I had been lead to believe
about nuclear energy and its historical events turned out to be
significantly different from what had really happened.

The
making of this film has taken me to four continents on a grand tour of
the hidden world of nuclear energy. I’ve been inside the doomed power
plant at Chernobyl (the first cameraman to do so, I believe), deep into
the Fukushima exclusion zone, and to a popular beach in Brazil that has a
naturally occurring background radiation level that’s over 300 times
what is considered “normal!” I’ve visited a little known research
facility in Idaho where a new kind of reactor was developed 20 years ago
that can’t meltdown and is fueled by nuclear waste.

If
there was a single ah-ha moment it was when I was granted entry into a
room in France (the size of a basketball court) where all the waste from
powering 80% of the country for 30 years is stored: four cylindrical
tubes 10 meters long and 1 meter wide are all that’s left from powering
the city of Paris for 30 years with clean nuclear energy! I thought,
“My God, what on Earth were we thinking?”

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

It has been nearly three years since the Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. Some 19,000 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami; short- and long-term casualties from the nuclear fallout are unknown. Those most exposed, of course, are the workers at the site. In November 2013, nuclear critics claimed that several clean-up workers have died but their deaths are not reported, or are not counted if they die while they are away from the plant. Even the famous first responders - the Fukushima 50 - remain unknown and unheralded. In 2013, the BBCspent weeks tracking down one of the first responders, who spoke about that first response team on condition of anonymity:

"The person who sent us back didn't give us any explanation," he says. "It felt like we were being sent on a death mission."

I put it to him that what he and his colleagues did was
heroic, that they should feel proud. He shakes his head, a slightly
anguished look on his face.

"Ever since the disaster, I haven't had a day when I felt good about myself," he says.

"Even when I'm out with friends, it's impossible to feel happy. When
people talk about Fukushima, I feel that I am responsible."

For an outsider, such a reaction is quite hard to fathom. For help, I
turn to psychiatrist Dr Jun Shigemura at Japan's national defense
university. He is one of two doctors who have studied the Fukushima
workers.

His research suggests that half of those who fought the
reactor meltdowns are suffering from depression and post-traumatic
stress symptoms.

"The workers have been through multiple stresses," Dr Shigemura says.

"They experienced the plant explosions, the tsunami and
perhaps radiation exposure. They are also victims of the disaster
because they live in the area and have lost homes and family members.
And the last thing is the discrimination."

Yes, discrimination. Not only are the workers not being
celebrated, they are facing active hostility from some members of the
public.

"The workers have tried to rent apartments," says Dr
Shigemura. "But landlords turn them down, some have had plastic bottles
thrown at them, some have had papers pinned on their apartment door
saying 'Get out Tepco'."

Monday, March 3, 2014

In the new Millennium, online surveillance comes hand-in-hand the media's external imposition upon, and transformation of, internal thought. It is not news that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) has arrived as a horrendous reality, although the UK is not yet known merely as Airstrip One. In some ways, the arrival is so horrendous that a portion of the public lives day by day in denial or willful ignorance, because it is easier to believe that things are not as bad as that. On 3 March 2014, Toronto Star columnist
Heather Mallick reported on the GCHQ collection of Yahoo users' video feeds and insisted, yes, it is as bad as that; we are living in a science fiction novel, where our own word processors are subject to outside control:

Whenever British
journalist Luke Harding, working on his new book about spying
whistleblower Edward Snowden, wrote something disparaging about the NSA,
a weird thing would happen.

“The paragraph I had
just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the
left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish,” Harding wrote in the
Guardian this week.

He has no idea who did
this. Were they American or British, a hacker or an offended National
Security Agency analyst? We know they were reading Harding’s words as
they were written but were they also watching him via a Skype-like
device?

A program codenamed
Optic Nerve gathered millions of stills from webcam chats between 2008
and 2010 and sent them in for viewing. In one six-month period alone,
Optic Nerve scooped up images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo accounts
around the world, the Guardian has reported.

Yahoo says it knew nothing of this.

In effect, people’s computer screens have become devices from Nineteen Eighty-Four where humans watch a screen that watches them back. But at least Winston Smith knew he was being watched.

In case you would like to know, the word processor that Guardian journalist Luke Harding was using was OpenOffice, which plainly lives up to its name. The Guardian has been in the thick of the Snowden leaks from the beginning. Harding admits that the entire staff felt paranoid. This post asks whether Orwell's dystopia is really here; or whether his Nineteen Eighty-Four world can still become a 'near miss,' a terrible alternate history that can still be narrowly avoided.

This blog often covers nuclear topics. For those who would like to learn more, the University of Pittsburgh is offering a free online course in Nuclear Science and Technology (Hat tip: Nuke Pro). The course starts on 3 March 2014 (there are future rounds as well) and runs for eight weeks in English and with subtitles. You can sign up here. All it will cost you is the textbook, which is here. It is also available at many different libraries, listed here (get the 1992 second edition or its 2008 reprint). And you might need to brush up on your basic physics and differential equations.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.